Project Management Software for Information Technology
Tim StutzmanGlobal ERP Systems Manager| Yogi TeaJunction City, Or, United States
Hello,
I am looking for project management software for my IT department. I am currently the new manager of the department and having a hard time wrapping my head around how much capacity the department has for project work and what team members are the constraint.
My team members work on IT tickets and projects. If it is a small project like a day or two (i.e. create a report) we do not create a project charter, WBS, project management plan, etc. If it is a large project then we do create the project management documents and create a project Gantt chart.
What I am envisioning is I can allocate each team members time to how much time is allocated on average to support tickets and small projects (varies from each team member). Then the remaining time could be allocated to large projects. For our large projects, Gantt charts would created in the application and durations for IT tasks would be allocated to each team member who the task was assigned to. The application using both time dedicated to support tickets and project task durations would then be able to tell me when project capacity for a certain team member is available and in theory this would also help in creating better times with better estimates for completion date.
Is there any software that can do this? I was told SmartSheet can, but wanted to get other opinions.
I believe JIRA is good and even better would be MSDevOps if your whole IT environment is already in Microsoft Dyanmics 365 Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
JIRA is OK if you have the fortitude to tailor it to your needs. I, personally, find it overkill for small- to mid-size organizations.
You may find Entry's TeamHeadquarters a sufficient alternative to cover your tickets, projects and people. I've used it for all those purposes at once. Saving Changes...
Tim StutzmanGlobal ERP Systems Manager| Yogi TeaJunction City, Or, United States
Thank you everyone for your input. Saving Changes...
Kimberly HonanITS Enterprise Solutions Manager| Cumberland County Innovation & Technology ServicesFayetteville, Nc, United States
We've researched a lot of the PPM solutions out there. I think most of them will do what you are asking. It sounds like you want a quick view of resource availability but also be able to track at the task level - both accumulative time taken and the time it takes for individual tasks. We just implemented Nifty. I actually just mentioned it in another post response. It's new for us but working out well. It's inexpensive and has some good integrations out of the box. There's the normal resource and timeline overview options, but it also has a timer so you can track actual time per task. We'll be happy to provide a demo so you can see how we're using it if you'd like. On a related note, we break our teams out so our tickets get quick response but projects are handled appropriately as well. Support handles tickets on a tiered approach. One group gets level 1 tickets, the more complex tickets go to level 2 support, and anything we can't resolve or within a reasonable amount of time gets submitted to the vendor for assistance. We have Project Managers and leads handle projects and those are prioritized by a set of criteria we've developed to give it a weighted score so we have justification for projects being placed in the order they fall into on our list. We've also used Projectmanager.com, which was also really good but more expensive. Other very common solutions are Asana, Monday.com, Jira, Teamwork, Wrike, ServiceNow, etc. But you'll probably find as we did that most are very similar and it will eventually come down to the look (some are really busy), the ease of navigation/use, and the price. So I'd start with the price point you're looking for and go from there. Saving Changes...
